I’ve recently discovered the Mission:Explore website, which provides some great opportunities for children and adults to go out on ‘treasure hunts’ around town and discover interesting facts about London and other parts of the country. Go over to the site and you’ll see that it is very child-friendly, fantastically colourful, great fun and best of all, entirely free!
I managed to catch up with Dan from Mission:Explore to ask him a few questions about the site:
Q: How did Mission:Explore come about?
A: The Mission:Explore website is a project that we have developed jointly with The Workshop, an interactive and creative agency in Sheffield. I personally first worked with them eight years ago on a web based project for the BBC. It focused on exploring Sao Tome & Principe through videos that I had shot in the small African country which is the in Gulf of Guinea. The Workshop do lots of awesome work for CBBC and lots of other businesses and organisations.
Q: What inspired you to create Mission:Explore?
A: Mission:Explore was started by a team of us called The Geography Collective. We’re a group of geography educators, artists, explorers and activists who want to inspire children to explore, think and learn about the world in new ways. We do this through what we call guerrilla geography. At the heart of this work is thinking about how we can inspire children to explore differently, encourage outdoor play, tackle the risk aversion that prevents so many children from playing outdoors and show how enjoyable a playful form of geography can be.
The website itself is based on our three Mission:Explore children’s books. These have won awards including the Hay Festival and National Trust Outdoor Book of the Year 2011 award, runners up for the ALCS & Society of Authors Education Writer of the Year Award and are also ‘Pink Stinks’ approved for being gender neutral. We’re currently working on a new book that focuses on food. We’re crowd-funding this book at the moment.
Q: What do you hope people will get out of taking part?
A: For children Mission:Explore is a pick’n'mix of rewarding and quirky activities. On the surface many of the challenges of Mission:Explore are just silly fun but in reality they do so much more. Each mission includes opportunities for playful learning. Children can be left to enjoy the missions on their own, but with a little guidance from a parent or teacher they can gain so much more.
For teachers and parents the site can be used to gather inspiring activity ideas to help children learn, play and explore in new ways. We have lots of rewards on the site that can be used as targets to achieve and with us checking for evidence that some of the missions have been completed, kids can get some great feedback too.
Q: Mission:Explore – it’s not just for kids is it?
A: Not at all. We have a split community, so if you are 12 or under then you can compete, collect points and earn rewards – but you can’t see any comments or free text. Everyone aged 13 and over can enjoy a range of features not available to younger explorers.
Q: Will you be expanding the range of ‘Missions’ in London?
A: Yes, but we’re focusing on some other UK cities first. We are going to be releasing 500 missions across 10 cities in the next few months.
Q: I notice the CEOP badge on the site – what advice do you have for children who will be taking part in Mission:Explore adventures?
A: The CEOP button on our site is good practice, and the site is a good place for anyone to learn about online risks and report problems. We have a Basic Training badge that explorers are encouraged to complete before doing any missions. It includes advice on being safe(r) on and offline.
Check out the Mission:Explore website for yourself here - it provides fun learning opportunities for the whole family (including grown-ups like me), and I’m sure it will help you to become more knowledgeable about our fantastic capital city.
January 25, 2012
Software and Websites